Dennett's intended rapprochement between physical realism and intentional relativism fails because it is premised upon conflicting arguments governing the status of design. Indeed, Dennett's remarks on design serve to highlight tensions buried deep within his theory. For inasmuch as Dennett succeeds in objectifying attributions of design, attributions of intentionality readily follow suit, leading to a form of intentional realism. But inasmuch as Dennett is successful in relativizing attributions of design, scientific realism at large is subject to renewed anti-realistic criticism. Dennettian-inspired (...) considerations of adaptationism substantiate the former move towards intentional realism, while considerations of the relativity of artifactual design encourage the latter move towards physical relativism. The ambivalence intrinsic to Dennett's ``mild realism'' can be viewed as a function of these two conflicting positions on design, for Dennett can no more avoid objectifying intentionality when he is realistic about design than he can avoid relativizing physical causality when relativistic about design. (shrink)

This paper responds to a problem, raised by Martinez, for Millikan’s explanation of the interpretability of novel signs in terms of mapping functions. I argue that Martinez’s critique is a logically weakened version of Kripke’s skeptical argument about rule following. Responding to Martinez requires two things. First, we must correctly understand the role of simplicity and elegance in choosing the correct mapping function for a signaling system. Second, we need to understand that mapping functions are descriptions of the features that (...) determine the content of signs; they do not themselves determine the content of signs. Bearing these facts in mind, Martinez’s concern is assuaged. However, we find that this position on the role of mapping functions is not fully consistent with Millikan’s response to Kripke. I modify her response to Kripke and demonstrate that the alterations do not undermine her view. (shrink)

There was a time when meta-ethical expressivism seemed to be the only game in town for meta-ethical non-representationalists. In recent years, though, meta-ethical inferentialism has emerged as a promising non-representationalist alternative. So far, however, inferentialists lack something that would really allow them to draw level with expressivists. This is an explanation for the distinctive difference between normative and descriptive vocabulary when it comes to disagreement—something expressivists can explain in terms of the difference between representational and desire-like states and which constitutes (...) one of the primary motivations for expressivism. This paper develops a novel and distinctive account for this difference on behalf of inferentialists, based on the different functions of these two vocabularies. Not only does this account help inferentialists, it also shows how non-representionalist accounts can capture the relevant disagreement phenomena without appealing to the sorts of desire-like states expressivists tend to appeal to. (shrink)

There is surprisingly little philosophical work on conceptually spelling out the difference between the traits on which natural selection may be said to act (e.g. “having a high running speed”) and mere circumstantial traits (e.g. “happening to be in the path of a forest fire”). I label this issue the “selectable traits problem” and, in this paper, I propose a solution for it. I first show that, contrary to our first intuition, simply equating selectable traits with heritable ones is not (...) an adequate solution. I then go on to argue that two recent philosophical solutions to this problem—due to Peter Godfrey-Smith and Pierrick Bourrat—are unconvincing because they cannot accommodate frequency-dependent selection. The way out of this difficulty is, I argue, to accept that extrinsic properties dependent on relations between intrinsic properties of the population members should also count as selectable traits. I then show that my proposal is legitimized by more than the simple accommodation of frequency-dependent selection. (shrink)

Those who identify colours with physical properties need to say how the content of colour experiences relate to their favoured identifications. This is because it is not plausible to hold that colour experiences represent things as having the physical properties in question. I sketch how physical realists about colour might tackle this item of unfinished business.

B&H understate the difficulties facing their version of color realism. We doubt that they can fix reflectance types and magnitudes in a way that does not invoke relations to perceivers. B&HÂ’s account therefore resembles the dispositional or ecological accounts that they dismiss. This is a good thing, for a dispositional account is promising if understood in an ecological framework.

Reflections on Meaning refines Paul Horwich’s use theory of meaning. Horwich holds that the meaning of a word is constituted by the nonsemantic property that best explains a certain law. For a given word, the law to be explained governs that word’s use by specifying the “acceptance conditions” of a privileged class of sentences containing the word (26). Horwich devotes considerable energy to details in Reflections on Meaning and focuses on especially pressing problems for his use theory of meaning. As (...) a result the book’s topics run the gamut, and the connections between its chapters are not always strong. Rather than try to provide a synoptic overview, I’ll discuss three areas where it seems further clarification and detail could be fruitful: the distinction between semantic and nonsemantic properties, context sensitivity, and compositionality. Horwich thinks ours is a “fundamentally non-semantic world” (27), making it crucial that meaning be explained in nonsemantic terms. In particular, he insists that we “exclude from the analyzing-properties [of word meaning] anything that would itself require analysis in terms of meaning”: we can’t appeal to reference, belief, or intention, for example (37). But Horwich does not object to “accounts of meaning in psychological terms,” and his own theory relies heavily on a psychological, nonsemantic relation that Horwich calls “acceptance” (37). It’s difficult to see a substantive difference between this technical notion and belief. Acceptance, for Horwich, is “the psychological (but nonsemantic) relation to a sentence that is manifested in our relying on it as a premise in theoretical and practical inference” (40–41). Belief, on the other hand, is a relation with these properties except that it is semantic. Horwich’s other characterizations of acceptance don’t sharpen the distinction very much: “S accepts a sentence just in case that sentence, or its mental correlate, is in S’s belief box” (41); “believing a given proposition is nothing more than accepting some sentence that expresses it” (61).. (shrink)

In this essay, I shall defend a transcendental argument for epistemological realism: the view that mind-independent yet cognitively accessible entities exist. The proposed argument reasons from the fact that we are conceptual creatures to the existence of a knowable outer world as a condition of the possibility of such creatures. I first lay down my general approach to concepts and conceptualization, according to which concepts are rules that agents follow in their cognitive activities. I go on to explicate the peculiar (...) normative nature of rules and rule-following, from which I extract, following Wittgensteinian considerations, an intractable problem for any idealist account of concept possession. I argue that the very possibility of conceptualizing requires the existence of external objects that enable the cognizer to regulate their use of concepts, and close with some remarks on the resultant nature and scope of metaphysical knowledge. (shrink)

Frank Jackson formulated his knowledge argument as an argument for dualism. In this paper I show how the argument can be modified to also establish the irreducibility of the secondary qualities to the properties of physical theory, and ultimately "secondary quality eliminativism"- the view that the secondary qualities are physically uninstantiated.

In a recent article in this journal, Zachary Ardern criticizes our view that the most promising candidate for a naturalized criterion of disease is the "selected effects" account of biological function and dysfunction. Here we reply to Ardern’s criticisms and, more generally, clarify the relationship between adaptation and dysfunction in the evolution of health and disease.

Volume 98, Issue 1, March 2020, Page 205-208.

There are now quite a number of popular or semi-popular works urging rejection of the old opposition between rationality and emotion. They present evidence or theoretical arguments that favour a reconception of emotions as providing an indispensable basis for practical rationality. Perhaps the most influential is neuroanatomist Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error, which argues from cases of brain lesion and other neurological causes of emotional deficit that some sort of emotional ‘marking,’ of memories of the outcomes of our choices with anxiety, (...) is needed to support learning from experience. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that ‘informed’ consent in Big Data genomic biobanking is frequently less than optimally informative. This is due to the particular features of genomic biobanking research which render it ethically problematic. We discuss these features together with details of consent models aimed to address them. Using insights from consent theory, we provide a detailed analysis of the essential components of informed consent which includes recommendations to improve consent performance. In addition, and using insights from philosophy of (...) mind and language and psycholinguistics we support our analyses by identifying the nature and function of concepts (ideas) operational in human cognition and language together with an implicit coding/decoding model of human communication. We identify this model as the source of patients/participants poor understanding. We suggest an alternative, explicit model of human communication, namely, that of relevance‐theoretic inference which obviates the limitations of the code model. We suggest practical strategies to assist health service professionals to ensure that the specific information they provide concerning the proposed treatment or research is used to inform participants’ decision to consent. We do not prescribe a standard, formal approach to decision‐making where boxes are ticked; rather, we aim to focus attention towards the sorts of considerations and questions that might usefully be borne in mind in any consent situation. We hope that our theorising will be of real practical benefit to nurses and midwives working on the clinical and research front‐line of genomic science. (shrink)

At least since Augustine, philosophers have constructed developmental just-so stories about the origins of certain concepts. In these just-so stories, philosophers tell us how childrenmustdevelop these concepts. However, philosophers have by and large neglected the empirical data about how children actuallydodevelop their ideas about the world. At best they have used information about children in an anecdotal and unsystematic, though often illuminating, way (see, for example, Matthews, 1980).

Searle’s (1963/1991) account of the communicative intentions in speech acts purports to be an advance over that of Grice (1957), in acknowledging the ineliminable role of the linguistic (usage) rules in enabling the hearer to recognize the speaker’s communicative intentions. In this paper we argue that, given some plausible assumptions about ordinary speech exchanges, Searle’s insight on this score is incompatible with his (1983) commitment to internalism in the philosophy of mind. As a result, Searle cannot have it both ways: (...) either he must give up his core insight regarding the ineliminable role of linguistic (usage) rules in the hearer’s recognition of a speaker’s communicative intentions, or he must give up his commitment to internalism the philosophy of mind. We conclude by arguing that this lesson is generic: the forced choice is one thatalltheorists must face, insofar as we theorize about the role of language in the communication of thought through speech. (shrink)

A “sender–receiver” framework based on models developed in several fields can provide a general treatment of communicative and symbolic phenomena, replacing traditional semiotic theories that have failed to live up to the hopes of their advocates. Sender–receiver models have mostly been applied to linguistic behavior, gestures, and other ephemeral interactions between individuals. I look at the application of this framework to enduring artifacts, including pictures, using indigenous rock art in Australia as a case study.

This article presents a comparative analysis between Georges Canguilhem’sEssay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological, published in 1943 and the English language debate that started in the 1970s between the naturalists and the normativists. Seemingly, this comparison illustrates the opposition between the French historical epistemology and the Anglo-American philosophy of sciences. However, I put into perspective what is generally considered an opposition between the two traditions by analyzing certain conceptual similarities.

In this paper I will try to defend a quasi-naturalistic interpretation of J.L. Austin’s work. I will rely on P. Kitcher’s 1992 paper “The Naturalists Return” to compile four general criteria by which a philosopher can be called a naturalist. Then I will turn to Austin’s work and examine whether he meets these criteria. I will try to claim that versions of such naturalistic elements can be found in his work.

The object of this paper is to discuss several issues raised by Fred Dretske’s account of the causal efficacy of content, as given in his book Explaining Behavior. To warrant the causal efficacy of folk-psychological properties while keeping attached to a naturalistic framework, Fred Dretske proposes that these properties are causes of a peculiar type, what he calls structuring causes. Structuring causes are not postulated ad hoc, to somehow account for the causal efficacy of content. Dretske claims that we independently (...) need this dualism of causes to make sense of some of our (not necessarily involving mental states) causal explanations. Even if this variety of dualism is not untenable from a openly-minded physicalistic viewpoint, it seems for several reasons preferable to establish that content properties are causally efficacious in the same sense that physical properties are. The main point I will try to make in this paper is a metaphysical one, namely, that Drestke’s structuring causes are causes of a more ordinary kind. I will try to show that we can make sense of the phenomena that structuring causes are introduced to account for in more conservative terms, having only recourse to the material we must anyway posit to understand ordinary causal explanations. (shrink)

This piece is a commentary on a precis of Maggie Boden's book "The creative mind" published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

This paper contains a formal theory of functional parthood. Since the relation of functional parthood is defined here by means of the notion of design, the theory of functional parthood turns out to be a theory of design. The formal theory of design I defend here is a result of introducing a number of constraints that are to express the rational aspects of designing practice. The ontological background for the theory is provided by a conception of states of affairs. The (...) theory is accompanied with a formal model. I prove that the theory is sound and complete with respect to this model. (shrink)